Bauman and the West: Exile, Culture, Dialogue

Principal Investigator: Jack Palmer
Value: £95,360.62
End date: September 2021
Funder: Leverhulme Trust

The principal aim of the project was to understand the role of the idea of the West in the sociology of Zygmunt Bauman, the first study of Bauman to adopt this focus. Beyond this, as a study of the life and work of an émigré intellectual, 'Bauman and the West' also constitutes an important intervention in an ongoing, more extensive discussion about Eurocentrism – defined as a recurring cognitive myopia in intellectuals and ideas emanating from Europe – in social and political thought. Through the development of the Janina and Zygmunt Bauman Archive, the project made use for the first time of extensive, hitherto unseen archival materials.

The project generated a number of significant outputs, including a sole-authored book, Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile (McGill-Queens University Press, 2023) which received an honorary mention for the 2024 PIASA Bronislaw Malinowski Award.  It also led to the publication of Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust: Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions (Routledge, 2022) , which gathered contributions to twinned events held in the UK and Poland, including an international symposium at the University of Leeds organised under the auspices of the project. The project also supported the development of a 3-volume series of unpublished and rarely accessed writings of Zygmunt Bauman for Polity Press (2021-2024)